‘Notes from the Underground’: On Isolation, Self-Deception and Spite
A review of ‘Notes from the Underground’, by Fyodor Dostoevsky; Digireads.com, 2006.
Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky is an unsettling little book that envelops its readers in the cramped, uncomfortable psyche of an unnamed narrator whose disdain for himself and the world is plain from the first paragraph. Published in 1864, it is a far-sighted psychological study that foreshadows existentialism and psychoanalysis, laying bare the corrosive effects of isolation, the paralysis that springs from overthinking, and the perverse pleasure one can take in self-inflicted suffering. This ‘Underground Man’, as scholars have come to call him, lives in self-imposed exile in a small, grim flat, scornful of society, unable to connect with it, pouring his disjointed thoughts into a narrative container that can barely hold them. He contradicts itself; he revels in its own self-debasement.
The novella opens with a tone of defiance. It veils the narrator’s bitter inner-directedness. ‘I am a sick man … I am a spiteful man,’ he says; and does so almost with a kind of pride, as if to cling to his failings is also to assert his uniqueness. But this identity, born of deliberate isolation and self-loathing, is in fact a prison from which he does little more but shake his fist at the heavens and condemn the ruling beliefs of his time. He attacks what he sees as the naïveté of ‘the rational man’, scorning the notion that human behaviour can be boiled down to the logic of cause and effect, and denouncing the Enlightenment faith in reason and progress. Human improvement is impossible, he says: people are driven by irrational whims and primitive instincts. For the Underground Man, to be human is to be contradictory, self-destructive, even wilfully spiteful — traits he treasures, yet loathes, in himself.
He attacks what he sees as the naïveté of ‘the rational man’, scorning the notion that human behaviour can be boiled down to the logic of cause and effect.
The story itself is split into two. Each is marked by its shape and tone. The first is a monologue, even a soliloquy, that veers between rage and resignation and serves as a lengthy prelude to the narrator’s theories. He covers his dissatisfaction with everything, from science to society to love. He denounces optimism with a kind of fervour. His tone is feverish, his ideas are unspooled from his mind and get tangled together. He borders on incoherence, his insistence on his own freedom muddied by his own clear paralysis. The Underground Man presents himself as one who is wholly aware of his own flaws, yet unwilling to change them. He savours his own pettiness, his grievances against the world building up like barnacles on his mind.
In the second half, the narrative takes a more traditional shape. The Underground Man recounts events from his life that reveal the depth of his pain and extremes of his alienation. This is not to say he is objective. What is ostensibly a retelling of his life is charged with feeling, in particular contempt — contempt for a former schoolmate and then for Liza, a young sex worker whom he tries to shame yet to whom he is drawn in a kind of tortured, sadistic need for validation. Unlike the Underground Man, Liza is innocent, and carries within herself the possibility for change. Yet rather than let her lift him up through genuine connection, he seeks to bring her down into his world of misery. His interactions with her betray his twisted need for self-abasement. He swings violently between cruelty and a wish to be understood.
The novella’s central themes of loneliness, the desirability of utopia, and collectivism, is reflected in its setting which, in its dreariness and isolation, serves as an extension of the Underground Man’s mind. The squalid, dimly lit room in which he lives throws light on his inner life, which is just as cramped and stagnant: a kind of purgatory where he wallows in bitterness and self-pity. His world is grey, damp and unyielding, trapping him in his malaise. Here he languishes in the dim twilight of his existence, too proud to seek connection yet too weak to sustain his deliberate isolation without constant anguish. Through Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky explores the extremes of individualism, the pain of separation, and the power of self-deception with a skill that has preserved the story’s relevance through time. One is tempted here to say something about our modern habit of self-isolation: absorbed in our phones, addicted to convenience, fancying ourselves able to construct identity from scratch, apt to throw stones at our culture to boost our self-esteem … Should I go on? We are all at risk, it seems, of becoming Underground Men.
Through Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky explores the extremes of individualism, the pain of separation, and the power of self-deception.
And we are, as a culture, unhappy. The Underground Man’s torment is ceaseless and timeless, a reflection of our darker impulses and our sometimes masochistic relationship with suffering. We cannot bring ourselves to humbly open up to the warmth and kindness of others. Better that we affirm our independence, even if we live in anguish. Dostoevsky’s prose, dense and at times convoluted, mirrors the narrator’s own tangled thoughts, challenging readers to confront the discomfort of seeing ourselves in a mind as troubled and muddled as the Underground Man’s.
Notes from the Underground is, in the end, a study in existential inertia. It is a relentless plunge into a mind that rejects happiness yet yearns for it, that fears vulnerability yet longs to be understood. It is as much a mirror as it is a cautionary tale, prompting us to question our own motives, our own rationalisations, our own perceived cleverness, and the unseen depths of our own ‘underground. Through this unyielding and unsettling study, Dostoevsky has left us something that is simultaneously repellent and magnetic, enormous prescient, a major work of literary psychology and a testament to his genius at laying bare the human soul.